Watch the video Math Class Needs a Makeover and read the excerpt from Principles to Actions. Pay close attention to the 8 Math Teaching Practices on page 10 and the chart on page 11 that outlines Productive and Unproductive Beliefs about Teaching and Learning Mathematics.
Consider
Respond and Interact
After watching and reading, please post your response to one {or more} of the prompts above. Read our colleagues' reflections. Feel free to respond to someone by sharing a comment, insight or interesting possibility.
- What is resonating with you from this video and reading?
- What caused you to pause and think?
- What math experiences from your own classroom came to mind as you were watching and reading?
After watching and reading, please post your response to one {or more} of the prompts above. Read our colleagues' reflections. Feel free to respond to someone by sharing a comment, insight or interesting possibility.
A quote that resonates with me was "students need to recognize the value of studying mathematics and believe that they are capable of learning mathematics through resolve and effort." Too often, students do not see the value of math and lack perseverance. Also, most students do have an aversion to word problems. We can, however, make a difference by establishing productive math beliefs.
ReplyDeleteI agree with L Farrell comment. Effective teaching and learning Math begin at young ages. We can build students confident in math by using everyday activities and objects around them to create math conversation. It also helps reinforce basic math concepts.
ReplyDeleteMathematics is a complex and highly practical subject for primary school students. Only by thinking about the real world with mathematical thinking and expressing the real world with mathematical language through practical activities can the knowledge learned in the classroom be truly internalized into students' knowledge. Overcome students' fear of difficulties, build confidence in their ability to learn mathematics well, and learn to use the acquired mathematics knowledge to solve problems.
ReplyDeleteDan Meyers' patient problem solvers proposition sounds intriguing. I would like to ask him whether he slowly divvies out the unknown information (such as the height of the water container) as students ask for it.
ReplyDeleteThe Document titled Effective teaching and learning had many breakdowns of the mathematical practices. I had to pause and summarize the key components in order to make them more digestible. It says that through the activities done in the class students should: (1) be challenged to use active meaning making, (2) connect prior knowledge and informal reasoning while analyzing preconceptions and misconceptions, (3) acquire conceptual knowledge as well as procedural knowledge, (4) construct knowledge socially through discussion, (5) receive timely feedback, (6) learn to monitor one's own learning.
I agree with Anna T and L Ferrell, If you don't start building that confidence at a young age it will be a constant struggle. We can learn and teach to build the confidence to help overcome fear of leaning math.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that resonated with me is "the math serves the conversation; the conversation doesn't serve the math." I was reminded of an Annie Fetter video that I watched years ago about creating genuine curiosity among our learners. It was in this video where I was first introduced to, "What do you notice?" and "What do you wonder?" These two simple questions have been game changers for me in launching a lesson.
ReplyDeleteI have started using the What do you notice, what do you wonder with my 4th and 5th graders. I would love some training on how to use them better. :)
DeleteMy first thoughts were around how teaching math needs to be more about what the student needs rather than what the teacher needs to teach. To get the involvement and "buy in" from the students we need to be leading the math, not teaching it in the usual ways. This will be messy and unpredictable, but my hope is over time I will grow as a teacher and my students will grow to love math.
ReplyDeleteThe math experiences from my own class that came to mind, were finding ways to show students that recognizing why math is valuable. Word problems specifically are difficult, and finding ways for students to lean in and actively engage and persevere has always been challenging.
ReplyDeleteSomething that resonated with me is the productive and unproductive beliefs. I think it's important that we recognize that the focus should be on what the students are doing and learning, not what we are doing. We should be facilitating deeper thinking for the students so they have a deeper understanding of why they are doing what they're doing. When the students are actively engaged, they are more likely to be happy in what they are doing. One of my favorite things to hear from students was "I love math now", or "Yay, it's math time"
ReplyDeleteThere were many things from the video and reading that resonated for me, both as a learner and as a teacher of math. Teaching students to be "patient problem solvers" was one of the things that stuck out to me the most. When it came to my own math learning, that was not a skill I learned and it showed any time the procedure or algorithm did not work the first time. When I was teaching kindergarten, it came up every year as we started with spending a good portion of time understanding the problem and not solving it. For many students this was frustrating, but it allowed them to build that patience. Now there are some many other ways, such as those mentioned in the video, that could help to build this skill even more. I am looking forward to continuing to learn through this course and in our journey to implement Illustrative Math and change our practices!
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that many students tend to forget previous concepts once they have moved on to a new math idea - for example, I have many 3rd graders working on learning multiplication that can no longer subtract with ungrouping; or I have 5th graders working on fraction concepts that can no longer multiply multi-digit numbers. So I look forward to more ideas to use to foster retention of the concepts. I was recently introduced to "numberless word problems" and plan to try using this resource in MAP as a different approach to story problems. It seems similar to the technique that the math teacher in the video was showing, removing all the excess words and asking a simple question.
ReplyDeleteThere were many ideas that resonated with me from the video. One in particular was the idea of giving students real world problems and examples, and how Dan mentions at the end of his video that we have so many accessible and free tools with technology at our fingertips to use as math teachers. This made me think about my new flat screen and how I can use it hand and hand with our curriculum next year. A couple of ideas he mentioned-being less helpful and asking the shortest questions resonated with me as I've taught illustrative this year, focused more on student based problem solving. By giving problems to students and having them create steps to solve instead of the teacher telling them how to, we're giving them more ownership of their problem solving and taking initiative at a younger age to persevere as critical thinkers.
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